Growing up during the cold war, China was a distant, mysterious, menacing spectre. During my new left years, during the cultural revolution, China became a beacon of possibility, when masses seemed to be examining the foundations of knowledge and pushing at the boundaries of the social order. Then it seemed to turn into a story of terror, of honest intellectuals being denounced, books being burned and scores being settled. What was happening? I could not believe the mainstream media, but I didn’t believe that those around me who were waving little red books and shouting about running dogs and paper tigers knew any better than I did.
So many dramatic events unfolded. China was finally accepted into the UN. Nixon went to China. Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong died. The cultural revolution was over. Deng Xiaoping announced a new path called reform and opening up.
In 1989, the world seemed to turn upside down. Every news broadcast showed crowds on the streets demanding everything from a reform of socialism to a transition to capitalism. I saw what was happening in China as part of this same historical tide. In Eastern Europe, those wanting to take a capitalist road got their way. Oligarchs rode high in a frenzy of expropriation, while masses plunged into depths of dispossession and despair.
In China, it was a different story, but what was the story? A picture began to emerge of international capitalism moving in, national capitalism building up, often with dubious dealings in the interface between capital and party-state. Agriculture was decollectivised. State-owned enterprises were made to compete with private businesses without any of their obligations to provide housing, education or healthcare. Some managers became owners and asset-stripped the businesses they had managed. So much that had been so laboriously created was being dissipated and destroyed. At the same time, there was stunning development. Underdeveloped areas became modern cities. Masses were lifted out of poverty. Standards of living soared. China did open the gates more fully to capitalism but kept open a path to socialism.
During the past few years, I have been teaching in China at Peking University and Renmin University, while pursuing questions that had been crystallising in my mind. In what sense is China capitalist and/or socialist? How strong is sincere belief in Marxism? How does this shape education and everyday life?
There is a tendency to believe that China was socialist and poor and then capitalist and rich. However, the advances made by China in the reform period could not have been achieved without the foundations laid during the revolutionary period. On the question of whether China is capitalist or socialist, I answer that it is both. China is engaging in a massive world historical experiment in a new relationship between capitalism and socialism, somehow using capitalism to build socialism. The state controls the commanding heights of production and investment and ownership of land, while the extent and power of capital allow exploitation of labour and excessive wealth accumulation, undermining socialist values. In the current period under Xi Jinping, there is a rebalancing, involving enhanced regulation of capitalism and renewal of socialist values.
China does not claim to have achieved anything more than a primary stage of socialism and to be on a protracted path to a more advanced form of socialism. Despite all that was achieved from 1949 to 1976, I understand why a new direction was necessary and how reform has brought industrial investment, scientific and technological advance, poverty reduction, international interaction. However, I question whether it was necessary to decollectivise agriculture, to privatise state-owned enterprises, to commodify housing, health care, education and other public provisions.
There is a complex and dynamic interplay of capitalist and socialist elements, where the lines of battle are often clouded over in a discourse about reform and modernisation that obscures the tension between capitalism and socialism and fails to clarify how this impressive and supercharged modernisation is going to develop into advanced socialism. There are people in China grappling honestly and intelligently with these issues. The intellectual atmosphere in China is far freer than many people believe.
Socialist values are still strong. If China were to go the way of the USSR, it would be a disaster, not only for China, but for the world. The US is in decline, whereas China is surging forward. Capitalism itself is in protracted decline, wreaking chaos, confusion and destruction on a massive scale. China stands before the world as an alternative path.
